Gorillaz

A shared flat, and a grudge against MTV

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett met in 1990, when Hewlett interviewed Blur for a comics magazine. They were not close for years afterwards, but by 1997 they were sharing a flat in London, and Gorillaz was conceived there in front of a television permanently tuned to MTV. Hewlett has described watching it for long stretches as a kind of hell with nothing of substance in it. The answer they arrived at in 1998 was a band that did not exist: a group of drawn characters who could carry the music without any of the people making it having to stand in front of a camera.

Hewlett drew four members. 2-D sings and plays keyboards, with Albarn supplying the voice. Murdoc Niccals plays bass, Noodle plays guitar and Russel Hobbs drums. Remi Kabaka Jr. has voiced Russel since 2000 and in 2015 became a permanent member of the operation as percussionist and producer, which is roughly the point at which the project stopped being a two-man joke about celebrity and became a working studio with a house style.

The records that built the frame

The self-titled debut arrived in 2001, reached number three in the UK and number 14 in the US, and produced "Clint Eastwood", still the song that closes most shows. Demon Days followed in 2005, went to number one in the UK and number six in the US, and gave them "Feel Good Inc.", which won the Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals in 2006. The same year they attempted to put the cartoon members on the Grammy stage using Musion Eyeliner projection, a technically awkward exercise Albarn has since talked about with more amusement than pride.

Plastic Beach in 2010 reached number two on both sides of the Atlantic and gathered the largest cast of guests they had assembled to that point. The tour that followed put the live band in plain view for the first time and, by Albarn's own blunt accounting, lost a great deal of money. The Fall, recorded on an iPad during those dates, was released on Christmas Day 2010. Then the partnership broke down: Hewlett complained in April 2012 that the screen behind the band seemed to shrink every night, and the project went quiet for years before Albarn simply asked whether Hewlett fancied doing another one.

The second half of the catalogue is Humanz in 2017, which brought a Brit Award for Best British Group the following year, the leaner The Now Now in 2018, the episodic Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez in 2020, and Cracker Island in 2023, nominated for Best Alternative Music Album at the Grammys.

Varanasi, two funerals and The Mountain

The ninth album came out of a bad run. Albarn and Hewlett both lost their fathers, and the mourning overlapped with a long trip to India. Speaking to 032c in February 2026, Albarn described Varanasi, where bodies have been cremated daily for millennia, as among the most beautiful places he has been, and credited Indian thinking with treating life and death as a cycle rather than a line. He also argued that the culture there had escaped what he called the celebrity virus exported from America.

The record was built across London, Devon, Mumbai, Jaipur, Rishikesh, Miami and Damascus between 2024 and 2025, with some tape dating back to sessions from 2001 to 2010. Albarn produced with James Ford, Remi Kabaka Jr. and Samuel Egglenton, with additional work from Bizarrap. Living guests include Asha Bhosle, Asha Puthli, Anoushka Shankar, Black Thought, Idles, Johnny Marr, Sparks, Omar Souleyman, Trueno and Yasiin Bey. Dead ones include Dennis Hopper, Bobby Womack, De La Soul's David Jolicoeur, Tony Allen, Proof and Mark E. Smith, all drawn from unreleased material rather than recreated. Hewlett has been explicit about the line: resurrecting a dead rapper as a hologram for money strikes him as vulgar. In the manifesto the two men wrote in 1999, Russel's stated power was channelling the voices of dead musicians. It took twenty-five years to use it.

"Damascus" began life as a Plastic Beach outtake called "Fresh Arrivals". The title track opens on a Rajasthan folk song played on ravanahatha, with bansuri and sitar behind it, and the album runs to fifteen tracks and sixty-six minutes in its standard form, with six languages across it.

Where they stand in September 2026

The Mountain was announced on 11 September 2025 alongside the single "The Happy Dictator", after four warm-up shows at London's Copper Box Arena in August and September 2025 — one of them a phones-locked mystery gig where the new material was aired. Singles followed through the autumn: "The Manifesto" on 8 October, "The God of Lying" on 6 November, "Damascus" on 12 December and the "The Hardest Thing"/"Orange County" pairing on 15 January 2026.

The album landed on 27 February 2026 on Kong, sold around 30,000 units in its first UK week to go straight in at number one, and entered the Billboard 200 at number seven on 53,000 equivalent units. It also topped the charts in Ireland, Switzerland and Flanders. Critics were close to unanimous: a Metacritic average of 86 from 24 reviews, five stars in The Independent, four and a half in Uncut and at AllMusic, four in NME, which called it arguably their most complete work since Plastic Beach, and a more measured 6.7 at Pitchfork. An eight-minute hand-drawn film directed by Hewlett with Johnatan Djob Nkondo, Max Taylor and Tim McCourt premiered the night before release. The band played "Clint Eastwood" and "The Moon Cave" on Saturday Night Live on 7 March 2026. Asha Bhosle's vocal on "The Shadowy Light" was her last recording before her death in April 2026.

Two hours under the Kong Studios sign

The Mountain Tour opened at Co-op Live in Manchester on 20 March 2026 and runs to 31 January 2027 across roughly seventy shows in five legs. The North American run — 23 arena dates plus a Shaky Knees headline slot in Atlanta on 20 September — began at Orlando's Kia Center on 17 September 2026 and finishes at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle on Halloween, taking in Madison Square Garden on 29 September and the Kia Forum on 24 October. Deltron 3030 open every night; Little Simz opens most of them.

Albarn fronts a large visible ensemble: Mike Smith on keys, Jeff Wootton on lead guitar, Seye Adelekan on bass, Jaega Mckenna-Gordon and Karl Vanden Bossche on drums and percussion, Ruth O'Mahony Brady on piano, and four backing vocalists. Behind and above them, Hewlett's animation does the heavy lifting, opening with "Kong Studios Presents" burning across the screens and giving each song its own drawn world rather than generic stage graphics. Reviewers of the Manchester nights counted eight guest vocalists in a single evening — Yasiin Bey on "Stylo" and "Damascus", Omar Souleyman, Bootie Brown on "Dirty Harry", Posdnuos on "Feel Good Inc." Rolling Stone UK called the Birmingham show a career-spanning celebration; the Irish Examiner used the word spectacular of Dublin.

The road to Bengaluru

After Seattle the tour moves to Latin America in November and December 2026, then to Asia in January 2027, including the band's first performances in India — dates in Bengaluru and Mumbai that close the campaign where much of the record was made. Given how much of The Mountain was recorded in Rajasthan, Mumbai and Rishikesh, and how many of its players are Indian musicians, those two shows are the ones with something to prove.

Hewlett has been consistent about not wanting the project to become a heritage act, saying flatly that he is not into nostalgia. The 2026 run is the argument: a new album that topped the UK chart at the band's twenty-eighth year, carried around the world by a set that still ends with a song from 2001.